Investigating The Translator’s Style:A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Howard Goldblatt’s Style In His English Translations Of Mo Yan’s Novels

In corpus-based studies of the translator’s style,only few studies investigate the translator’s style embodied in the translations of a specific writer.This research aims to investigate the translator’s style of Howard Goldblatt in his eight English translations of Mo Yan’s novels.He has facilitated Mo Yan’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 and thus has promoted Chinese literature "going global" to a great extent.This research will promote the in-depth development of studies on the translator’s style and the international communication of Chinese literature.In this research,four self-built corpora are established,including a corpus of Mo Yan’s eight works,a corpus of eight corresponding translations,and two reference corpora of American English texts and translated texts.Revising the model proposed by Professor Huang Libo,and adopting the quantitative and qualitative methods,this research explores the translator’s style of Goldblatt reflected in his eight translations of Mo Yan’s novels at the lexical,syntactic,and textual levels,as well as the translation strategy in his English translation of the image-contained Chinese idioms.The major findings are as follows:(1)At the lexical level,Goldblatt’s translations feature word richness.The ratio of Chinese characters to English words reveals that Goldblatt keeps his translations within an appropriate range.(2)At the syntactic level,he lessens the difficulty of sentences by using medium-length sentences,and adjusts sentences according to the language style of the source texts.(3)At the textual level,he integrates paragraphs in some cases.The average translated paragraph contains more sentences than the original paragraph.His translations are easy to understand and closer to American English in terms of readability.(4)Generally,as for the translation strategy in his translation of the image-contained Chinese idioms,there is a slight tendency towards domestication.To be specific,the translation strategy of four-character idioms has an obvious tendency towards domestication while that of proverbs has a strong tendency towards foreignization.Diachronically,that of repeated image-contained idioms has kept consistency.